PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
claiming a 1 percent share of the total length in all transport infrastructures,
and reach its maximum rate of growth close to 2058, thus helping
recovery from yet another depression around 2050. In keeping with the
usual pattern, this new transport infrastructure must provide a factor-often
improvement in speed or, more precisely, in productivity (load times
speed.) A supersonic plane based on new technology—possibly liquid
hydrogen—may provide Mach 8 in speed but will be useful only for
long distances. Supersonic flight is obviously not the answer for linking
cities within a continent. Since speed of existing airplanes is sufficient
to serve shuttle links such as New York to Boston, the future vehicle
must increase the number of passengers by a factor of ten, the equivalent
of the Boeing 757 or the European Airbus, but with a carrying
capacity of close to twenty-five hundred passengers! The problems arising
from handling that many passengers in one flying vessel would be
formidable.
An alternative may be found in Maglevs. These trains have been
studied for some time by the Japanese; they move at a mean speed of up
to six hundred miles per hour, and from the point of view of speed and
cost they are like airplanes. Maglevs should only connect core cities in
order to justify their high capacity and investment costs. Considering the
head start of the Japanese, the first operational Maglev may be between
Tokyo and Osaka, creating an extended city of over 100 million sometime
in the early twenty-first century. Maglevs may finally functionally
fuse other large urban areas such as Shanghai – Beijing, producing “linear
supercities as ‘necklaces’ of old ones.” 8
Maglevs would serve as links between supersonic air routes, and
therefore the best location for their stations would be airports. Airports
are already becoming communication junctions, a function served by
railroad stations at the end of the nineteenth century. For the picture to
be complete, fast subway connections to the airports are necessary. The
subway system, far from being satisfactory today, has nevertheless been
evolving in that direction already. Most large cities offer a subway connection
to the airport today. Moreover, as forecasted in the previous
chapter, a new wave of ambitious city subway projects is to be started
around the turn of the century.
214